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Newspapers think newspapers have bright future ahead

In case you missed it (you ungrateful non-newspaper-readers), the Financial Post and Canwest News Service ran a series this week on the future of newspapers, which unless you’ve been living under a rock recently you’ve noticed are in a bit of business trouble. But these writers know newspapers are better than those other media.

My problem with newspapers is that they’re often absurdly wrong about things I know about (tech) so I *don’t* trust them about stuff I don’t (pretty much everything else).

I read the newspapers are a trustworthy medium article and right in the title it says “40 per cent of all Internet traffic goes to newspaper websites”. That seemed fishy to me so I read the article and find:
“It’s interesting if you consider that 40 per cent of all Internet traffic goes to newspaper websites,” he says.

That’s it. The only reference is “Mitch Joel, an internet rock star”. Convenient that he’s a former magazine publisher who write columns in the gazette.

That’s exactly the kind of article that completely breaks my trust in newspapers. Most bloggers don’t do any fact checking whatsoever but most bloggers I actually follow regularly do. And none would put forth a stat as ridiculous as 40% of all internet traffic goes to newspapers. It doesn’t even make semantic sense let along logical. The vast majority of internet traffic is downloads, p2p sharing, torrents, streaming media, etc. Even if we just count links I’m pretty sure the 40% of links going to newspapers is pulled straight out of the guy’s ass.

The underlying truth of all this though is that you *never* believe *anything* a “digital marketing guru” says. Or an “SEO consultant” or “online branding expert” or any combination of those kind of buzzwords.